Description: Documents the surprising role pharmaceutical science and technology has played in Russia's search for national identity over a century of political turbulence.
Brief description: Olga Zvonareva is Assistant Professor of Health, Ethics, and Society at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, as well as an Associate Professor at National Research Tomsk State University and Siberian State Medical University in Russia. She is the coeditor (with Evgeniya Popova and Klasien Horstman) of Health, Technologies, and Politics in Post-Soviet Settings: Navigating Uncertainties.
Review Quotes:
"...a remarkable contribution to the burgeoning academic literature on the socio-political aspects of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry in Russia ... Pharmapolitics in Russia is a timely and thought-provoking book and is enthusiastically recommended to all scholars and students of Russian politics and society." - Europe-Asia Studies
"This book gives an account of Russian pharma without falling into the time-worn trap of arguing for Russian exceptionalism, whether by demonizing or romanticizing the Soviet period, or by relying on tropes of Russia's relationship to 'the West, ' its 'development, ' or 'backwardness.' Instead, Zvonareva traces how these tropes, and their deployment by various social actors, become part of the broader assemblage of contemporary Russian pharma." - Eugene Raikhel, author of Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic